


Meeting the City of Mind

by MotherInLore



Series: Slayers West [6]
Category: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin, Slayers (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Magic and Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 09:54:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7431229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At last, they've reached their goal (they think.)  It's stranger than anything they could have imagined.  (So what else is new?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meeting the City of Mind

The Rekwit River basin was full of butterflies. You couldn't walk more than a pace or two without seeing another one. They clung to the leggy, silver-green plants that lined the roads and dotted the pasturelands. They rose in the air like giant, orange dust motes. Butterflies shaped out of beaten copper shone from the stucco over door lintels. Butterflies of painted feathers or glass beads decorated hair clips and belt buckles. Paper butterflies flew on kite strings. In the villages, dancers fluttered long, orange-and black sleeves to flute and dulcimer music. Jugglers spun bright lacquered shields and threw wedge-shaped plates in the air. Butterflies were everywhere.

“It's so beautiful!” Amelia spun in a circle, trying to take in the sights in all directions. “I wish I could paint it!”

Wehisho smiled, too. “This is the first time I've made it to Rekwit during the Milkweed Turning festival. We're lucky. The butterflies will be heading north into the Always Fog country within another nineday or two, and everyone will stop celebrating and go back to work.”

Zelgadis indicated the nearest silver-green plant, which had three butterflies clinging to it. “I take it this stuff is milkweed? What's the significance?”

“Well, you know festivals usually have more than one,” Wehisho answered, settling comfortably into tour guide mode. “Milkweed is a useful and generous plant. The flowers can be eaten, though you shouldn't have more than one or two clusters a day because they're slightly poisonous. The seeds make a fiber that can be used for stuffing, like down, or in papermaking. The sap is used to make rubber, which mostly goes toward surgical gloves and contraceptives. Most human people around the Inland Sea do something with milkweed, but the Rekwit people actually plant it. They trade the rubber, among other things. So when it stops blooming and the butterflies move north, that's when they have their summer festival, and then they do the rubber harvest. And since the rubber gets used for prophylactics, the butterflies become a symbol of purity and protection, and their departure is a symbol that the place is moving into the dangerous part of summer, with droughts and wildfires.”

“Ah.” Zelgadis pondered. “Surgical gloves? Those would be related to the 'foreign cells' that you say cause disease?”

“Exactly,” Wehisho confirmed. “They help protect the patient from anything on the doctor's hands, and can also keep infection from spreading the other way: say, from a lanced abscess through a hangnail or a scrape.”

“My, my,” Xellos observed. “And so the fragile butterfly becomes a mighty protector and starts to decorate shields and door lintels. People are so very inventive, aren't they?”

“Indeed,” Wehisho agreed peaceably, and Xellos said nothing further, to nearly everyone's relief.

Amelia let the conversation wash over her. Local folklore was interesting, but they were so close to their goal now that it was hard to concentrate on anything else. All these weeks upon weeks of traveling, unable to send so much as a letter home. All the running into danger, the following false leads, it was all coming to an end. In Choum-Rekwit, the Scholars of the Exchange would show them how to contact the City of Mind, and Wehisho-san assured them that that mysterious entity knew about everything “In the five houses of the earth,” and would be able to help them. _I'll do it!_ Amelia promised herself. _I'll find wudun before it falls in the sea, and bring it home!_ Amelia could barely contain her excitement.

Lina let the conversation wash over her. The butterfly thing was neat, she supposed, but it wasn't as though she could make any money off it. The Exchange, though, and the City of Mind.... _Wehisho said it remembers everything, and tells you anything you want to know. And it makes maps! I bet it would give us treasure maps if we asked it to! Even if other people had the same maps, they don't have magic around here, so we'd have that advantage.... Gold! Amulets! Maybe a new sword for Gourry! Oh, wow... and whatever's frying in that kettle over there smells delicious!_ Lina could barely contain her excitement.

Zelgadis reminded himself not to get too excited. The exchange of the City of Mind was a repository of great knowledge, but Wehisho had said there were no chimeras in the West, and that the experiments the City did on its own behalf mostly did not involve the biological sciences. And Rezo, of course, had said there was no way to undo what had been done to him. However, Wehisho had also told him, “The exchange says it is possible to change the map a body follows,” and it was not yet clear that her warning: “what the exchange thinks is possible doesn't always work for humans” applied equally to a human who could use magic. Maybe, just maybe.... but he wouldn't let himself get too excited.

Gourry let the conversation wash over him and looked around with interest. He thought the pink and yellow and orange stucco on the houses was pretty, and he was grateful to the Rekwit people for maintaining their roads better than just about anyone they'd come across lately. On the main towpath up the river, the spaces that could have been rutted with the passage of wagon wheels were set with baked brick, in two broad, ocher-colored lines. If you stayed on the brick as you walked along, the way was smooth and much less dusty than otherwise. That left Gourry with the attention to spare to watch the orange butterflies and the funny silver things like flying, one-eyed crabs that seemed to be a little more common here than elsewhere on their journey. He sighed, contentedly. The weather was warm, Lina was in a good mood, Xellos had stopped being scary at Wehisho for the first time in quite a while, and whatever was frying in that kettle over there smelled fantastic. He couldn't remember exactly why they were on their way to Choum-Rekwit, but did it really matter, on such a beautiful day?

****

The inn at Choum-Rekwit was a long, low building, with all the rooms facing a central courtyard that housed a kitchen and tables, as well as a good-sized fountain, decorated with glazed tiles (butterflies), with troughs for humans and horses. Public stabling was available nearby under the auspices of a different organization that had something to do with an entity called “the train.” Wehisho suggested that everyone go about their own pursuits for the remainder of the afternoon and meet up at the courtyard for supper, then led her mule away to the “train landing.” Lina, Gourry, and Zelgadis went off in search of the public baths, Amelia spoke to the innkeeper about rooms, and Xellos settled himself at one of the tables and requested tea.

Gradually, as the hour grew later, the rest of the travelers returned to join him. Wehisho brought with her a lanky older man with a bald head and startling, green-tinted spectacles with perfectly round lenses. “This is Lal-Duk-Ti,” she introduced him. “He has agreed to help you learn to use the Exchange, since you still don't read Tok very well. Tomorrow is his usual day there, and he says we can spend the whole time with him if we like.”

Lina pumped a fist in the air, grinning. Amelia clasped her hands and squeaked, then pulled herself together and stood up to pose properly. She cleared her throat and made a speech: “Lal-Duk-Ti-san, on behalf of the Kingdom of Seyruun, I thank you for your most generous aid. Your wisdom may prove crucial to our success at this vital quest!”

Lina and Zel both rolled their eyes, but the scholar seemed gratified. He smiled, and favored the princess with a creaky bow before lowing himself onto the bench. “I am pleased to be of service,” he told them. “In fact, that is why I came this evening. If you can give me some idea of what you are looking for, I can start thinking now about how to best frame the request to the City of Mind so that the answers are useful to you.”

“I want to find a cure,” Zelgadis said immediately. “I want to be human again.”

The green glass circles swung to face him straight on. “You will be the one Wehisho wrote to me about from the Tuberhuny exchange. I have made only the beginning of a beginning, but I will show you what I have so far. Be warned, though. The City of Mind does not readily understand narrative explanations for events, and its interest in biology is... limited.”

Zelgadis nodded. “About what I expected,” he said. “Nevertheless, medical theory here is so very different than what I was brought up to that I hope to gain some insight.”

“Even so.” Lal-Duk-Ti looked back at the table. “How about the rest of you?” he asked, generally.

Gourry shrugged. “I'm just here to keep Lina from getting in trouble with anybody. And sometimes the other way around.”

“The young lady in white mentioned a quest of some sort?”

Amelia took a deep breath. All through this long journey, she'd been cautious about being too specific about what, exactly, the oracles had said, in case the wrong people heard and tried to stop them. But surely the time for that was past. “Our visionaries told us,” she said, “that we needed to seek the City of Mind in the Far West, and give our own city something called _wudun,_ 'before it falls in the sea.' ”

Wehisho sat bolt upright and whipped her head in Amelia's direction. “Why didn't you _say_ something?”

“Wehisho-san?”

“We could have taken care of that in Anitok!” She ran her fingers through her hair, loosening her last two combs and defeating any vestigial neatness she had managed to impose on it for the last few hours. Wehisho tucked the combs in a pocket. “You could have done that before you even crossed the Spine!”

“Wehisho-san?”

“So what is 'wudun,' then?” Zelgadis asked.

“It's the Kesh word for exchange,” Wehisho told them, more calmly. “And the City will build an exchange for you at any town larger than fifty people. All you have to do is go into an existing exchange and ask.”

“That is one meaning, in one language,” Lal-Duk-Ti pointed out.

“In this part of the world, though?” Lina asked. “Our prophesy did tell us to seek _wudun_ in the West.”

The scholar tilted his bald head sideway and waggled spidery fingers, noncommittally. “I'll look it up tomorrow,” he promised. “I would certainly recommend that the young lady see about getting an Exchange in her home place regardless, unless she thinks it will make trouble there.” With the green glasses hiding his eyes, it was impossible to tell if the smile that accompanied his statement was meant to be friendly or threatening.

“Oh!” Amelia blinked, and then recovered herself. “Oh, no! No trouble at all! The City of Seyruun values the pursuit of wisdom and would be honored to learn from the City of Mind. Thank you so much, Lal-Duk-Ti-san!”

“Hmm...” Xellos looked up at them all, over the rim of his teacup. “If 'wudun' refers to something that you could acquire anywhere within a thousand-mile radius, one wonders why your prophets used a word that could only be recognized here. Or west of here, really, where Kesh is the common language. Could there possibly be some other reason for you to visit the Na Valley?”

Wehisho glared at him, but said nothing. Zelgadis looked at both of them, then shook his head in dismissal. “That's a question for later, if at all. Tell me, master scholar, what do we need to know about the exchange going in?”

Lal-Duk-Ti shrugged. “Going in? Not much. The Exchange can teach you how to use it, over time, and in the short term you have me.”

Zelgadis persisted, “So, the people in the City of Mind...”

The green glass circles flashed. “People?”

Wehisho's forehead wrinkled. “I suppose they could be people... of a sort.”

Zelgadis wondered to himself just how strange the inhabitants of the City were. Wehisho showed no difficulty or hesitation in assigning the label “people” to volcanoes, fleas, deer, and patches of milkweed. What kind of being, exactly, was only a person “of a sort” to someone like that?

Lal-Duk-Ti flapped a dismissive hand. “I refuse to discuss the existential status of the City in any depth without the assistance of cannabis. All you need to do is learn Tok and then go through the training programs, and then learn the rest as you go.”

“But how does it work?” Zelgadis persisted. “The exchanges talk to the city --”

“The exchanges are the only way to talk with the City,” Wehisho emphasized.

“By what means?”

“They have machines,” said Wehiso. “I only sort of know how they work, but the Exchange can show you that, too.”

“And how are the machines maintained?”

“Oh... well, humans do some of it, or else the City sends other machines that repair the ones at the Exchanges,” Lal-Duk-Ti answered patiently.

Wehisho's eyes lit up. “You should ask the exchange to show you pictures of the places the machines are made! They're really amazing. They do it in huge, underground buildings out in the poisoned places, and it's almost all dark, with little glints of metal here and there, and these thin, thin beams of light going in straight lines, and sometimes sparks and heat glow from shaping the metal pieces... It's like nothing else I've ever seen.”

“Who builds these repair machines?” Zelgadis asked.

Wehisho sighed. “I just told you! Other machines, underground, in the poisoned places.”

“And who designs them?”

“The City. Which I'm not sure is really a who.”

“Not without cannabis!” Lal-Duk-Ti interrupted, waving an imperious finger.

“The City of Mind,” Wehisho explained carefully, with half an eye on the Rekwit scholar, “is made of what machines are made of. Some of the machines of the City hold memories, and some make calculations, and some communicate with humans. Still others have different ways of sensing the world – temperature, motion, and so on, and measuring it. All these machines have ways of sending and receiving signals from each other, just as a living body or a community signals to itself and makes adjustments.”

Zel planted his hands on the edge of the table and leaned in, incredulous. “So the whole City of Mind consists of machines, without anybody running them,” he paraphrased. The two westerners nodded. “How could that even happen?”

“Cannabis...” Lal-Duk-Ti muttered.

Lina rolled her eyes. “Why do you even care?” she asked with her mouth full. “We need to know stuff, the Exchange will tell us stuff, end of story. Pass the crunchy things.”

Gourry looked up, blinking. “Hey,” he said, “Those little silver flying crabs: are they machines from the City too?”

“Yes, exactly!” Lal-Duk-Ti smiled. “We call that kind 'pings.' ”

“What flying crabs?” Amelia demanded, “Where?”

“Haven't you noticed them?” Gourry scratched his head. “I've been seeing them everywhere, for ages. Not very many of them, usually, but still...”

“They're about the size of a hummingbird,” Wehisho told them all, “And they all have little solar collectors for power so they tend to choose sunny spots, like lizards or bugs. Some of the pings are sensors and information gatherers, and some of them do repairs, and some of them we don't know what they do, but they're harmless.”

“Are you absolutely sure of that, Wehisho-san?” Amelia had a sudden vision of being swarmed by tiny metal crab monsters, sawing away at her with little tiny pincers. 

But both the westerners just laughed. “Of course I'm sure!” Wehisho assured her.

“Yeah, Amelia,” Gourry added, “I've seen these 'ping' crabs around here and there since we crossed the Great Tableland on the other side of the Spine, and they haven't done a thing so far!”

“The City of Mind wants to know everything,” Lal-Duk-Ti told her. “It grows when it learns more. Why would it want to destroy something when it could study it instead? The City is very careful about that, and that is why the big installations are nearly all in the poisoned places.”

“Oh!” Amelia took a few deep breaths and a steadying bite of supper. “Well, I guess that's all right then.”

Zelgadis refused to let himself get distracted. “What I want to know,” he insisted, “is how such a thing ever came about in the first place.”

Both Wehisho and Lal-Duk-Ti shrugged, but Xellos set his teacup down, causally. “I believe it may have started with the Lost Cities. They had machines for sending messages, and for counting things, and for exploring in places humans couldn't go, and of course it was very efficient to have all these machines be able to talk to each other, so that your icebox could tell the market what food you needed, and so on...” His tone of voice was careless and conversational, but Zelgadis caught the moment his eyes slitted open and glanced sideways at Wehisho. She thought the Lost Cities had been evil, and Xellos never missed a chance to tell her how one piece or another of her current way of life originated from them. Wehisho, though, did not respond at all.

Xellos went on. “The people of the Lost Cities used to be very fond of telling themselves stories about a terrible day that would come when all their servant machines decided to rebel and take over the world. I wish we mazoku had noticed the point where the City of Mind developed this degree of independent initiative; we could have... well, never mind. I can see how access to the City as it is could be very advantageous.”

“Indeed, I should say so!” Lal-Duk-Ti exclaimed, waving his skeletal hands. “You can see it all over the Omorn peninsula: the more people are willing to use the Exchange, the wealthier they are. Just look what happened to the Condor People! All those soldiers and hooligans everywhere, but they only let about six people use the Exchange at all, and pffft!” The fingers of one hand came together, indicating a squashed bug or a deflating balloon. Given what he'd heard of the Condor People's unsuccessful attempt at empire, Zelgadis thought “pffft” was an oversimplification worthy of Gourry, but there was really no reason to start an argument by saying so.

“Well!” Lina concluded cheerfully, “I'm looking forward to tomorrow! I guess maybe I'll turn in early. Gotta have my beauty rest so I'll be at my sharpest tomorrow, right, Ducky?” She pinched the scholar's cheek in a gesture that was probably meant to be affectionate, and left the table.

***** 

The Exchange at Choum-Rekwit looked almost exactly like all the other buildings – stucco, copper butterflies – except for the pole at one of the rear corners, two or three stories high and supported by guywires, topped by a giant metal bowl, set at an odd angle. Slender fronds of metal stuck out here and there from the sides of the pole, following some kind of pattern but not the compass points. Lal-Duk-Ti led them all through the main door and into a large, airy room, well-lit by high, slot-like windows running along just under the ceiling. The walls to the left were covered with noticeboards – some of them painted with grids holding chalk writing, others covered with rough cloth and full of papers held by metal pins. The wall to the right was covered by a half-dozen or so narrow curtains. Gourry peered behind one of them, curiously.

“Oh.” Lal-Duk-Ti glanced backward. “The brown curtains cover supply shelves, and the blue ones are private study nooks. It seems like we've always got at least one boy who has recently discovered the erotica archive, so the polite thing to do if you hear noises coming from behind one of them is to pay no attention. And the one on the corner leads to the toilet down the hall.”

“Good to know,” Zelgadis told him, solemnly. The building had a sound of its own, too, he realized – a very faint humming, as if a beehive had set itself up within the walls of the building. The far wall was lined with tables and benches, and over each bench was a window of black glass, and under each window was a pair of holes in the wall – one barely a slit and one larger rectangle. Lal-Duk-Ti slid himself onto one of the benches and everyone crowded around him, watching as he pressed a square, clay-colored button that was set into the table, and the window flashed white with startling suddenness and settled to a steady glow. Against the white surface, black words stood in rows. Zelgadis caught 'weather,' 'new messages,' 'search,' and 'fire... something' in the list. There were one or two others that he couldn't make out. 

The scholar took up a stylus and drew invisibly on a little glass tile, set into the desk next to the rows of buttons. In the window, a rectangle appeared around the word “weather.” “I'll just get all the automatic things taken care of,” he told them, “and then we can start figuring out this 'wudun' business.” He tapped the stylus, and suddenly the window was looking out on a map of the Omorn peninsula. Well, 'map' was a bit of a misnomer; it was a clear picture, as if one were looking at it from some great height, higher than even eagles flew. Like a map, though, the picture was decorated here and there with lines and arrowheads. Along the bottom of the window, black words marched across a white ribbon.

“Never much going on with the weather this time of year,” Lal-Duk-Ti noted, and took up a stick of charcoal from a box on the other side of the desk and made a note on a square of paper. “The fires, now, though...” he went on, tapping a few buttons. The squiggles and arrowheads disappeared, replaced by red splotches here and there. Lal-Duk-Ti sighed with relief. “Still not spreading in this direction. But in summer we check the fire map several times a day.” He did something else with rows of buttons and they were abruptly looking at the page of black words again, then flickering to other pages, while the scholar took notes. He listed names (he said) of people who had 'new messages' addressed to them, and did something with the stylus to make one message disappear off the window completely. “Dolphin priest,” he told them. “They send things to the whole darned hemisphere and none of it makes any sense if you're not part of their cult.”

“Is there some way to retrieve the message, if someone wanted to look at it later?” Xellos asked from the back of the huddle around the bench. 

_Why does he– oh. Dolphins. Right_. Zelgadis dismissed the question of the mazoku's intentions to the back of his mind. “Sure,” Lal-Duk-Ti answered, “Just use the search field. I'll show you later. Meanwhile...” A sweep of the stylus made a whole set of phrases in the window reverse their colors, becoming white words on a black field: “I'll print these up and put them on the pinboards. They're meeting announcements, general requests for pen-pals, things like that. No fixed recipient. And I'll write up the list of other people that have messages waiting for them.”

“How do you keep someone else from reading a message intended for you?” Amelia asked.

“You can't,” the scholar told her. “Nothing on the exchange is private. But practically speaking, if they're talking about fruit tree genetics and you're not an orcharder, there's no point. This key here is the one for printing a paper copy of the message- or whatever you want to print.” He pressed the button and the wall started making a horrible, grinding, shrieking noise. The narrower of the two slots in the wall emitted a long tongue of slick, gray-white paper, printed in black ink. Periodically, at the end of the message, the grinding shriek would be replaced by an equally appalling cross between a slurp and a crunch. The paper would come loose from the slot and try to curl itself into a scroll. Then the first noise would start up again and another tongue, with another message, would emerge.

Zelgadis let go of his ears briefly to rub his eyes. They'd been staring at the bright glare of the little window for barely half an hour but already it made his eyes water. No wonder the man wears those green glasses. “All right then!” Lal-Duk-Ti attempted to stand up briskly and managed a creaky simulacrum. “I'll just get everything posted.” He walked along the wall with the boards, consulting his scribbled notes to make changes on the chalk ones, and pinning the scrolls of paper to the cloth-covered ones. He shoved a few expired notices and his own scribbled notes into the nearest of the large holes in the wall. Xellos peered in after it, curiously, but made no comment. Lal-Duk-Ti took off his spectacles, revealing small eyes rimmed by wrinkles, rubbed the lenses on a fold of cloth, replaced them, and rolled his shoulders. “And now I'll open the doors and other people will start coming in and out, and working at the other consoles. We'll just keep to the one we're at.”

“Do the consoles all have people assigned to them?” Wehisho asked, as a few of the citizens of Choum-Rekwit wandered in. “I would like to send a message to the Valley and do one or two other things.”

Lal-Duk-Ti directed her to a station that “rebooted” every thousand heartbeats and was intended for quick use. Less than a minute since they'd opened the doors, it was already occupied, with a drift of people huddled around it, waiting their turns. Wehisho took one look and decided to stay with the rest of them and join the huddle later.

“Now then!” the Rekwiti scholar cracked his knuckles and settled on one side of the bench under “his” desk. “We'll get to work... Come sit, young lady.” Amelia edged herself onto the other end of the bench. “You take the stylus. It moves this marker on the screen, see? Move it to where it says 'search' there at the top. Good. And tap it twice.... there we are. So our search term is 'wudun,' and...what else do we know?”

“Um, not much, Lal-Duk-Ti-san,” Amelia said, biting her lip and concentrating on the window in front of them. “The prophecy told us to bring 'wudun' from the West, and it's in danger of falling into the sea. We think. Either that, or...” her breath caught and she shuddered, then sat up straight again.

“It's also possible that it's her home city of Seyruun that's in danger,” Zelgadis said for her. “We were told to seek in the west, and that the city needs wudun 'before it falls in the sea,' but we're not sure which noun 'it' refers to.”

“Ah,” Lal-Duk-Ti did not look around. “Well, we'll start with geography then. And chronology – it needs to be something that exists now, but it might be an object that's quite old and forgotten, so we'll set the limits broadly....” His fingers tapped busily away at the buttons, looking more like spider legs than ever, and new letters appeared in the window. Then the view split in two: the white page full of words compressed itself into a strip half a handspan wide at the side of the window, and the rest of it was replaced by yet another vividly colored map of the world. “Amelia, please move the arrowhead to your home city, tap, and then draw a circle around it and tap again. Keep doing that until you get to the place where you people want to put your Exchange.” He muttered under his breath, “might as well irrigate the beans with the dishwater.”

“All right...” slowly, Amelia drew circles. When she picked a starting point inside the Barrier Lands, the old man's eyebrows rose until they cleared the lenses of his spectacles, but he had little to say about it. Each circle started out like a blur of mosaic tiles and then resolved until it looked almost like a real window. Circling the Seyruun Pentacle led to a map so clear Zelgadis could recognize the Temple roofs by their different patterns of decoration, not just their location. Until this moment, he had not realized just how many trees there were in Seyruun; the maps left them out. The City did not.

“Oy,” he said. “Is the City... is it showing us what it sees right now?” The implications were a bit disturbing, and the more so since it seemed the City did not keep secrets.

“It can do that, if you ask,” Lal-Duk-Ti told them, “but usually it shows something more... abstract. A sort of compilation of anything that's stuck around for more than a few days.”

“When the Condor armies were moving,” Wehisho told them, “People used the Exchange to see which way they were going and get out of the way or make plans to fight. And a few people who knew how asked the Exchange to tell them what the people in the Condor's City asked them about. But if you're not making war, it's too much trouble to be that nosy, usually.”

_It could be pretty troublesome even if you_ are _making a war_ Zelgadis reflected. Possibly the local predilection for small skirmishes, scheduled, in some cases, in advance, was starting to make even more sense. _It's not that they're too naïve to think of the large-scale operations, it's that the intelligence leakages are too bad._

“Can you use those ping creatures to spy on people?” If so, Zel wasn't sure even the vast memory of the City was worth the risk of introducing it to Seyruun....

“You can't direct the pings.” Lal-Duk-Ti assured him. “The City does that, and only for its own ends. If you ask, the City will tell you how to make pings of your own, but you'd probably bankrupt yourself trying to build a spy network.”

“Ah.” Zel relaxed.

Amelia interrupted them. “Where do you think, Zelgadis-san? It has to be somewhere we don't need a lot of committees to approve it first, but I want it to be available to scholars... and if I choose one of the temples all the other ones will complain.” She had reduced the area of the map to include mostly the palace grounds.

Zelgadis considered. “By the library, maybe? You already let people in there by appointment. And once people have some idea how useful it is we can probably build more of them. So it doesn't have to be all that accessible at first.”

Amelia's hand with the stylus hovered, then she set it down and wiped her eyes. She picked it up again, sniffing, and drew an X in one of the courtyards. Zel blinked. “Your mother's private garden? Are you sure?”

Amelia bridled. “Of- of course! It's not like she's _buried_ there. And we can cut through the wall here and it'll be easy to get to from the library... it's the best place for it.”

“But I thought that was your fav- never mind. You're right, it's a good place for it.”

Amelia's chin wobbled, and Wehisho reached out and patted her comfortingly on the back, sparing Zelgadis any internal struggle about whether he should do so. “M- mother wouldn't have minded,” the princess whispered. “She loved Justice, and Wisdom, and... and it's not as if it were being destroyed by the Zanafar, or by Lina-San... this is a _good thing_... an amazing gift...”

“Hah!” Lal-Duk-Ti barked with oblivious satisfaction, “Here we go! Request confirmed for exchange node 5866154 of the Terrestrial Cybernet, to be established at Latitude 47.30.55.5994, Longitude -1.3.20.4579. Construction protocols initiated. Estimated start time for on-site construction, 25.84 days. Estimated project completion time, 410.96 days. A reminder to allow construction machines to work undisturbed. Repeated disturbances will result in cancellation of project.” 

“Wait!” Amelia pounded her hand down on the desk, making the window blink. “Can we have it give some sort of warning if people disturb it? No one at home is going to have any idea what's happening.”

The scholar scratched his bald head. “I'll find out.” The words flew along the white page in the window again, and the wall emitted a beep. Out of the hole that had seemed to be a waste receptacle flew three little black and silver things that had to be the elusive 'pings.' They hovered over a particular part of the floor, forming a triangle about five feet in the air and about three feet wide. Various other people looked up from their business about the exchange and wandered over curiously. Zel started slightly. It had been amazingly easy to forget all the real world going on behind him as they all stared into the window that spoke to the City of Mind. _Gourry's gone missing. When did that happen?_ The old scholar steered Amelia gently into the area the pings had delineated. “Say -er- Bee-Ee-Gee-I-en-' I'm spelling it out so I don't trigger anything- when you're ready to record your warning, and then Ess-Tee-Oh-Pee when you're done.”

“Um... OK....” Amelia twisted her fingers, took a few deep breaths, and then planted her feet and lifted a finger in her favorite pose. “Begin,” she said, “I, Princess Amelia Wil Tesla di Seyruun, have authorized these machines to construct a building in this area which will serve as an 'exchange,' where we will find amazing machines which will allow us to talk to the great City of Mind, thus increasing our wisdom and understanding in the pursuit of Justice. Please avoid this area and allow the machines to complete their tasks. I promise to explain the whole thing as soon as I get back home again... I love you, Daddy!” She waved cheerfully and then blinked. “Oh, um, stop.”

A turning wheel appeared on the window to the City, which was abruptly replaced with a perfect simulacrum of Amelia, Finger of Justice and all, standing on the other side of the glass and talking. “...Please avoid this area and allow the machines to complete their tasks. I promise to explain the whole thing as soon as I get back home again... I love you, Daddy! Oh, um, stop.”

“That good enough?” Lal-Duk-Ti asked. 

“That should do just fine, thank you sir!”

The old man smiled. “No thanks necessary; that was very exciting! Suppose we break for lunch and come back to start work on your more complicated questions?”

 

***

 

Gourry joined them shortly after that, along with two or three of the shield-jugglers he had made the acquaintance of in the course of the morning. “Guys! You have got to see this train-thing they have before we leave! There are all these giant wagons with grooved oak wheels, and the grooves sit on these metal bars, and it all runs so smoothly that two dozen mules can carry as much as a fully loaded galleon! And there's this monster machine they have that pulls even more during the wet season... it's unbelievable!” He listened eagerly to the others' accounts of their quieter morning, but declined to follow them back to the exchange again when they'd all eaten. “Too complicated for me,” he told them. “Besides, these dancers and I were going to teach each other some new moves.” 

Back inside the Exchange, the others split up into smaller groups as well. At Lal-Duk-Ti's recommendation, Wehisho and Amelia sat by one window to work on the question of _wudun,_ just in case it meant something other than the Exchange. Lina, at her insistence, settled in at another one by herself. “OK, OK, I've got it now, thank you. Go away and let a girl work!” Lal-Duk-Ti and Zelgadis settled back at their original station, to try again to find out what the City knew about chimeras. The hours slid by...

“Well, I don't think it's very likely your prophesy was telling you to practice ritual coprophagy, do you?” Wehisho checked the map on the other half of the window. “Especially since that place is really more south than west. So that leaves the plants from the Irsitut people, who have already agreed to send seeds and potted starts down this way for us, though they say they don't know of any particular use for them, or the Exchange, which we've taken care of, or, just possibly, somebody named Wu Dun along the Hurricane Coast. We can send messages that way too, if you want, but it probably makes more sense for you to stop by on you way back.”

Amelia wrung her hands. “ _Hurricane_ coast? What if Wu Dun-San falls in the sea before we get back? What if they're a- a fisherman or something?”

“ _Imhai, binyez_ ,” Wehisho soothed. “Listen, if 'wudun' is a person, they can't be the one in danger because they wouldn't be an _it,_ would they? At least, not along the Hurricane Coast. They have some very strict taboos against intersex people.”

“But that's worse!” Amelia insisted, “Because then it's my home that will – will... if 'wudun' means the Exchange, the way you thought at first, then it would warn us about earthquakes and tsunamis, right? But if we were too late...”

“Would your people not be prepared for that possibility already, just from the original prophesy?”

Amelia brightened briefly, then huddled down in her chair again. “Daddy would probably say we should do something. But the ministers, well, the prophesy was supposed to be a secret right at first, and they'd all think we had to do something, but not right now, and...”

Wehisho snorted wry agreement. “No different than in Tachas Touchas, I see. Just because we don't have rulers at home in the Valley doesn't mean we don't have politics. The reverse, if anything. But listen, you are doing what you can, and you have to trust your people to do the same. If you think your presence is needed at home, you can start planning to go back as soon as possible – by boat, with your magic wind in its sails if you want.”

Amelia shook her head, sadly. “No, I shouldn't worry. And we'll at least wait until those plants come. If you really think it would be faster to wait than to just go up there.”

“The train from the Always Fog Coast is very reliable. It will be better to wait.”

***

Slowly and patiently, Zelgadis worked his way through the list of possible search terms Lal-Duk-Ti had compiled, learning, as he did, how to talk to the City in a way that did not simply yield piles of statistics. As they went on, the practice of writing by tapping little buttons became more and more automatic, and the beeps from the machines in the walls became less irritating. The older scholar had a good eye for anomalous details in a list, and a second piece of paper, titled “further investigation,” had several leads that Lal-Duk-Ti had suggested.

In a way, the dead ends were less frustrating than the possible leads, since it became clear that any one of these new studies might be enough to keep a small guildhall occupied for years, discovering or rediscovering these unheard of ways of understanding the workings of the body. “Lipoid Proteinosis” and “Vervain Poisoning” had been crossed off the original list, but one of the “further investigation” scrawls suggested, “test self for presence of silver.” The term, “Epigenics” had been glossed with “large-scale regrowth/recovery! Talk to Sylphiel.” Another, “Biocybernetics,” bore with it the more dubious label, “maybe.” 

Even more exciting than the growing list of terms was the realization that he didn't have to be afraid of missing something. The City never forgot anything, never concealed anything. Whatever he forgot to list now could come up a year and a half from now when the new Exchange in Seyruun was ready to run. Or at any other exchange that would let him in, between here and there. No frantic scrambles, no way some other mage was going to steal the volume he needed before he got to it. _Hiya, City. Where have you been all my life?_

****

_A search for “treasure'” yielded 258,452,950 possible results. Do you wish to refine your search?_ Lina pounded a fist on the table full of buttons, producing a crash, a loud beeping, and a swarm of pings coming to (presumably) repair the damage. Lina took one look, shouted, “Seeyouguyslaterkay?” in the general direction of her friends, and scooted out the door before either pings or the Rekwit people could start in on her.

***

Xellos manifested in the darkened exchange about two hours after midnight, when the only other presences were the pings that marched like ants around the console Lina had broken. He settled himself at one of the stations and tapped the keyboard into wakefulness. None of the messages from the Dolphin Priests revealed anything surprising. Lord Beastmaster had had many acid things to say about the amount of energy her sister put into cultivating fanatics, and the low return she got on this investment. Xellos had his own opinions about the process, but it wasn't his place to volunteer them. Not when there was this other matter to take care of.

Xellos worked his way rapidly through several dozen preprogrammed lessons in using the Exchanges and in the structure and function of the “Terrestrial Cybernet,” as the City of Mind seemed to call itself. Finally, he tapped a question into the “search” box: _Describe scenarios under which the entire terrestrial cybernet could be permanently disabled or destroyed._ The little working wheel appeared, to eventually be replaced by yet more words and diagrams. Xellos read them with growing satisfaction. “My, my,” he murmured to himself, “the City really doesn't keep any secrets! How _useful!”_

**Author's Note:**

> That's right: Xellos wants to break the Internet.
> 
> Milkweed rubber is canon in _Always Coming Home._ The process is not currently economically feasible, so presumably some botany has happened between now and then.
> 
> The City of MInd is canon for ACH, but pings are not. They're kind of implied, though.
> 
> The lat/long for Seyruun puts them on the Iberian peninsula, I think in Portugal but I'd have to look it up again. The number for the Seyruun Exchange node is the patent number for Narcan, just because I came across the information in an article at the right time to write it down.
> 
> This ends one arc in _Slayers West_ but I have more I intend to do with it (eventually). The longer it goes on, though, the more _ACH_ and the less Slayers you get. (Which is probably why I have so few readers left. My thanks to all five or six of you anyway!)


End file.
